Everyday Literacies

Oceanbooks: a New Zealand ebook publishing co-operative

A fellow New Zealander living in Mexico has just written, talking about having joined an electronic publishing co-operative in New Zealand, called Oceanbooks.

Writers join the co-operative by buying shares. This helps support the work of authors who are interested in publishing digitally and don’t want to have to self-publish or work with commercial publishers.

One of the directors of Oceanbooks is an IT specialist, which is handy for providing the on-the-ground expertise for establishing and maintaining the site and working up the necessary digital resources for doing the job. Bryan Winters describes himself as “an aging surfer” with a background in IT who lives by the beach. Suzanne Singleton, Director and Treasurer, is a former teacher and psychologist who now enjoys writing.

The co-operative offers a hard copy option as well, and find that with books selling for as low as $2.95 their authors can still earn more from their sales than in commercial publishing. Clearly, the co-operative is high on goodwill and low on other values that are writ large into commercial publishing culture. Besides working with epub format, Oceanbooks also offers a Kindle option.

It has always been a struggle for New Zealand writers to find publishers because the local market is small and conventional publishing options have always been limited. Even prize winning fiction writers have found “bottom lines” standing in the way of getting contracts for hard copy publishing in the past. After all, selling 2000 copies is no small feat in a tiny market. And publishers of fiction in particular are often looking at such figures as a bottom line for risk.

Oceanbooks is by no means unique, or even rare by now. Publishing ebooks often involves forms of co-operation between authors and press. But a shareholding co-operative is still a minority option, but one which is ideally suited to New Zealand circumstances and temperaments. And Oceanbooks appears to be a pioneer on the New Zealand scene.

We wish it all the very best.

Another new book in our series! Teresa Strong-Wilson's edited collection, "Envisioning New Technologies in Teacher Practice"

This is a lovely account of an extended professional development partnership between schools and a teacher preparation program at McGill Uni in Montreal. Many of the chapters are written by participating teachers and all of the chapters provide important insights into what an effective teacher action research project looks like on the ground. Contents include:

• Teresa Strong-Wilson: Teachers, Change and New Technologies
• Teresa Strong-Wilson/Bob Thomas: Turning Points in the Professional Development--Model and Methodology
• Teresa Strong-Wilson/Dawn Rouse: New Wine in Old Bottles? Remediation, Teacher as Bricoleur, and the Story of Antaeus
• Teresa Strong-Wilson/Amy L. Cole: A Room of One's Own: Exploring the Relationship of Teacher Research to Integration of New Technologies
• Teresa Strong-Wilson/Amy L. Cole: Conversation, Blogging and Teacher as Researcher: Building Collegiality and the Project's Social Memory
• Teresa Strong-Wilson/Amy L. Cole: The Teachers' Case Studies
• Teresa Strong-Wilson/Dina Tsoulos/Dawn Rouse: Sea Changes: Digital Storytelling, Turning Points, and Teacher Agency
• Bob Thomas/Bonnie Mitchell/Manuela Pasinato/Kelly Ryan/Marie-Claude Tétrault/Penny Bonneville/Teresa Strong-Wilson: Postscript: Keeping the Lights On.

And, from the back cover blurb:

How do classroom teachers envision new technologies within their practice? In the conversation on incorporating new technologies into classrooms, teachers are often sidelined. Envisioning New Technologies in Teacher Practice looks at the complex ways in which teachers move forward to embrace change as well as how they circle back, continually revising their practices while subtly resisting change. In addition to examining how teacher identities change over time, the book also reveals how they can be changed. Co-authored by a university research team - four teachers, a principal and LWL's pedagogical leader - the book discusses the professional development model that emerged and foregrounds how a teacher action research component contributed to teachers' - and students' - learning.

If you're interested in teacher education, teacher professional development and digital technologies, then this book is for you!

New book out: Erik Jacobson's Adult Basic Education in the Age of New Literacies!

Here's to the latest book to appear in our New Literacies and Digital Epistemologies series with Peter Lang: Erik Jacobson's Adult Basic Education in the Age of New Literacies.

Accoriding to the back cover blurb:

This volume addresses the ways that the field of adult basic education has already been impacted by changes in technology and what needs to happen for learners and teachers to take full advantage of newly developing resources. The analysis is organized around three main themes: Learning, Teaching, and Organizing. Each section reviews relevant research and sample instructional resources, drawing on work done from around the world. A key concern is moving beyond the hype to look for the specifics of practice - what exactly is new about contemporary adult basic education? Rather than a celebration of technology for technology's sake, the analysis asks a series of questions. What do we want learning to look like? What do teachers expect of themselves as professionals and learners? Finally, how is technology being used to shape the field, and how can we use it to work for changes we believe in? This book is essential reading for pre-service and in-service teachers, as well as instructors in a variety of fields relating to technology and learning.

Having read the book ourselves, we can vouch for it having an excellent balance between theory and practice, between innovative ideas and the hard realities facing many adult educators.

Moneyballing knowledge: Or, Walmart epistemology

I want to make three disclosures at the outset. First, I buy a LOT of stuff from Walmart (call me a backslider, I know the issues, I just can't resist good stuff at those prices). Second, I love Wired magazine, and am a serious fan of Chris Anderson, even when I might disagree. Third, I like Brangelina and really enjoyed Moneyball – I knew I'd enjoy the movie, but did not expect to be as stimulated by it as I have been since catching it on a Toronto-Mexico City flight on the weekend.

OK, way back in 2000, during a collaboration on an Australian Research Council funded project with Chris Bigum and Leonie Rowan, on online and distance learning, we collectively coined a notion of “digital epistemologies”. Michele and I subsequently published a few pieces on this theme and, perhaps for this reason, it never caught on at all. Not even making it part of the title of our book series could breathe life into it. So it goes. We forgot it and let it rest in peace – unlamented.

However, funny things happen. Especially in Mexico (along, of course, with not so funny things). A couple of months back a collective charged with creating a Spanish language Dictionary of Philosophy of Education to be published in Mexico asked for an entry on “Digital Epistemologies”. I felt the earth move under my feet, and since then, from time to time, I have been giving the work some thought.

Way back in 2000 we used the term as a shorthand for a host of issues and questions about knowledge and belief and information and so on under the condition of ubiquitous digital media and mediation. More recently, however, we have been thinking of digital epistemologies in terms of four “ends of”: the end of truth, the end of ideology, the end of theory, and the end of individual(ist) knowledge. That's the story we'll largely focus on for the Dictionary entry.

A little while back we bought a couple of nice brushed steel cordless kettles for use down here in Mexico. They weren't cheap, even though they weren't top of the market. We bought one in the north, and one from a posh store here in Mexico City. After barely a year they both died, the same way, within a week or two of each other. It was a sad end to the sorts of kettles you wouldn't mind your friends and colleagues seeing in your kitchen. They had to be replaced.

Last weekend we arrived in Toronto in time to do a bit of Friday evening shopping ahead of Saturday's class and a quickfire return to Mexico City. I had done some online sleuthing: where is the nearest Walmart to the hotel? Check. What do they have in cordless kettles? Google, as always, was bounteous on both counts. I liked the look of a 1.7 litre white plastic kettle priced at $14.88 normally, but in this particular store for $12. We bought two and filed them away in the suitcase. Early indications are that they are robust, very effective, and should easily outlive their superiors. In dollar terms they'd only have to last 3 months each to do that, but I have much higher hopes.

Following my entranced viewing of Moneyball on the flight back I have been thinking about those Walmart kettles as somewhat analogous to using sabermetrics to get Major League Baseball wins from players who cost only a fraction of what cultural insider baseball lore would identify as “the best players”. Billy Beane wanted wins, just like I want a cordless kettle that works, and works for a decent period of time (a “win” in my terms). He got his wins, and an American League record, by buying the baseball equivalent of Walmart kettles. Wins being the objective, Walmart kettles are not inferior to higher end kettles; and where they win more and win longer they are superior. Screw any cultural snobbery that would insist on a better brand, a better look, a more “sophisticated” product, the kind of thing a chef to the elite would insist upon.

So, more than three years ago, Chris Anderson proposed the end of theory in a typical Chris Anderson gem published in Wired magazine. In the Petabyte Age, said Anderson, the scale of data is such that the Google model of agnostic statistics wins out. Google's algorithms can't tell us why one web page is better than another. They simply tell us which one is better from the perspective of people looking for epistemic “wins”. A kind of sabermetrics of information. When there is so much data and such strong computing power and algorithms as to throw up patterns that can underwrite successful decisions and courses of action, why would we miss “the theory”.

In Anderson's words:

Petabytes allow us to say: "Correlation is enough." We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.

…

The new availability of huge amounts of data, along with the statistical tools to crunch these numbers, offers a whole new way of understanding the world. Correlation supersedes causation, and science can advance even without coherent models, unified theories, or really any mechanistic explanation at all.

Predictably, Anderson's approach brought on similar kinds of refusals and rebuttals from academics and (certain kinds of) scientists to those portrayed in Moneyball as coming from baseball purists faced with sabermetrics.

Two things are pretty obvious here. The first is that we are looking at a trifecta (assuming for the meantime that my Walmart kettles will go the distance). My consumer metrics are backing my new kettles to give me more wins at a cheaper price (less complication) than their brushed steel predecessors. The Boston Red Sox won the World Series in 2006 using sabermetric principles and, furthermore, Major League Baseball franchises have increasingly embraced sabermetrics, and teams that have done so have fared not too badly in recent years. And, as Anderson observes, there is a discernible drift within fairlysome mainstream areas of science toward finding statistical patterns and going from there. In other words, there is something of a trend that is going across wide stretches of everyday life: consumer economics (I am not the only person who shops Walmart when they have wider options); baseball; science. You will be able to think of others. But maybe there is a pattern here that goes below the surface of contemporary ways of doing and being.

The second is that the stakes are pretty obvious. It is clear what the gains are and where they lie – even though the games in question are by no means the same, they are nonetheless different versions of getting more with less. That is, “more” in some sense. The losses are in tradition, “culture” (in an elite sense, maybe), style, a certain kind of propriety, and so on.

The question for me, I guess, is whether there is a deeper loss -- maybe in something akin to the sorts of things John Stuart Mill was trying to redress when he sought an alternative to Jeremy Bentham's version of Utilitarianism. Or, again, maybe in a stronger sense still: a sense that speaks to caring and taking care in ways that we presume humans to be uniquely capable of at their best. We might get a good pragmatic decision from acting off a correlation, but is that decision as good – in a humanist, ethical, moral, or whatever sense – as one that is backed by the kind of caring that sometimes goes into hard core theoretical angst-ing?

Needless to say, I take at least a little solace from knowing that so far as cordless kettles are concerned there is in all likelihood no less exploitation of human beings involved in the creation of artifacts that turn on brushed steel chefs than in the creation of my plastic fantastic boiler. Nonetheless, the wider phenomenon leaves me uneasy. Can we have “purism” and “justice”? Can we all participate fairly in “noble traditions”? If not, what is the moral math around doing/getting more with/for less?

If I were you I'd give notions like digital epistemologies a big swerve … They can mess up your day.

Call for papers: Themed Issue on 'New Literacies'

Alan Amtzis, academic editor of "The Educational Forum", advises:


The Educational Forum, Kappa Delta Pi’s premier educational research journal, is seeking articles for its upcoming Fall 2012 theme issue on “New Literacies” and its relationship to teaching, learning and other major educational dimensions. The Educational Forum is an international, peer-reviewed journal whose mission is to “publish compelling research findings and thought-provoking perspectives as a catalyst for stimulating and encouraging research and dialogue and for advancing and transforming education.”

The Educational Forum is seeking original empirical research and conceptual essays that address the ways in which contemporary understanding of “New Literacies” are enacted in educational settings from pre-K to adult learning [with a focus on]how technological and other contemporary developments ... have (or have not) influenced the work, lives and thinking of teachers, students and others involved in education. Papers that address the reciprocal relationship of “New Literacies” to classroom practices are of particular interest.

For full and specific instructions to authors, including page lengths and formats, please visit our web link

The submission deadline is March 23, 2012. For more information on The Educational Forum, please visit the journal’s webpage:

Contact either Academic Editor Dr. Alan Amtzis at amtzis@tcnj.edu or Managing Editor Sally Rushmore at sally@kdp.org if there are any additional questions.

Reflections on "the last time"

It's 10 days since we spoke in Comillas and, as luck would have it, the whole thing was absolutely memorable. It was simply a fabulous experience on all dimensions: academic life at its best, and we came away feeling privileged to have been there.

Partly, but only partly, this was because we were happy with the way our presentations went. While it was doubtless idiosyncratic, our respective Spanishes seemed to work fine on the day. The audience was largely an audience of people who worked in foreign language learning, so they knew all about inter-languages and intercultural subjectivities and the like. They knew how to make better sense of what sense we were making, and we felt confident that regardless of how we actually said it, what we wanted to say was being communicated. The audience were gracious and welcoming and enthusiastic for their subject area. There was no hint whatsoever of academic competitiveness or one-upmanship. No one was there to score points or make impressions. They were there to celebrate an area of inquiry and to share enthusiasm. There was an exemplary spirit of collaborative endeavour everywhere we looked. Everyone was giving truth to the adage "we are here to learn", and from what we could tell there was plenty of learning done over the two days. And we had great friends with us in our talk, because some of our closest colleagues are deep in research areas concerned with learning other languages. Rebecca and Eva and Steve were there at the heart of what we had to say and, as always, JPG was integral to the frame. We riffed off the intriguing work being done by John Hagel and colleagues on the interplay between the familiar "push" paradigm of resource mobilisation for pursuing goals and an emergent "pull" paradigm, as well as drawing on work by John Seely Brown and colleagues on social learning. These ideas, in conjunction with the concept of social languages, gave us plenty of room for ranging over cases of (mainly) young people acquiring forms of proficiency across languages other than their own in diverse online settings.

More than this, however, we reveled in the company of wonderful people, many of whom knew each other well and brought their friendships as well as collegiality to the scene. The social life during comida and after the end of each day was vibrant and warm. Conversations ranged widely, and there was plenty of humour and sharing of perspectives. The Comillas Foundation were incredibly generous hosts. Every aspect of hospitality and organisation was expansive and considerate. Everything was in place on time; there was nothing that had not been anticipated. From the time we were met to the time we were dropped off we never had to ask for a thing -- every conceivable "need" had been anticipated.

And the small coastal pocket of Cantabria that is the town of Comillas lent its own distinctive magic and bounty to the occasion. We were told that during the summer tourist season the population explodes from the 2500 souls who live there permanently to over 45,000 -- and it is easy to understand why. The food is superb, from the freshest of seafood to the endless array of tapas dishes, and bread that would do the finest French bakeries proud. And the red wine was as kind as the people themselves. Comillas was pretty much a tiny fishing village until a local lad ran off to Cuba at the age of 14 in the early 1830s to seek his fortune. He duly made one -- marrying well helped in this regard as well -- and brought some of it back to Comillas. Lending the King of Spain a small fortune seems to have been associated with being made a marquis, and the first Marquis of Comillas built the impressive Pontificia University complex, part of which has been restored and houses the Comillas Foundation, and the remainder of which remains unused and in search of a new purpose. The first Marquis of Comillas' son in law was an early patron of Gaudi, whose magnificent Capricho is in the heart of Comillas, right alongside the massive residence built by the Marquis, which is now maintained by the Municipal Council of Comillas. We spent the Saturday morning after the conference, before heading to Santander for the remainder of the weekend, visiting these two amazing buildings and getting as good a sense as we could of the history of the town.

Finally, the time in Comillas reflected the generous spirit of our colleague Daniel Cassany, who had put the academic side of the event together. Daniel has a wonderful sense of proportion with respect to life generally and academic life in particular. We drank deeply at his well and look forward to ongoing collaborative work with him, as well as with others we had the good fortune to meet over those days.

As tired as we were by the time we got back to Santander, we were feeling sufficiently optimistic and robust (just) to take a chance on public transport to go visit the historic town of Santillana del Mar on the Sunday. Truth be told, the original agenda had been to visit the site of the Altamira Caves and take tour through the replica cave that is open to tourists. But by the time we had explored the town and had a meal to die for and then walked to the cave site they were closing for the day. As much as we had anticipated learning about the caves we weren't the slightest bit put out at arriving late because the town was nothing short of splendid. We just lost ourselves in the 15th and 16th centuries, between the buildings and the surrounding farmland. Over the 6 days we had scratched enough of the surface to know that this is a part of the world we want to return to, at length and at leisure, in the future. During the bus ride back to Santander Michele began anticipating her next sabbatical. Given that she had just finished a long sabbatical in September, one might think she was jumping out of the blocks just a little early. But I don't think so. Planning to spend some serious time with such people and places can never begin too early.

Our thanks and best wishes go to all who were involved in the seminar and in hosting and accommodating the participants. They provided as experience of academic life that is as good as it gets.

Meeting in Comillas

We have arrived in Comillas to participate in a two day working conference hosted by the Fundacion Comillas. The opening plenary, by Franciso (Paco) Yus of the University of Alicante has just begun. It's 3am in Mexico City right now, which seems like a good time to be trying to attune our ears to Spanish spanish. Paco is working his way through a comparative analysis of written discourse across analogue and electronic media.

This time tomorrow we'll be presenting -- that's a lot of attuning to do in a hurry ...

The Fundacion, located in a huge ex seminary on the top of a hill overlooking the small picturesque town of Comillas and overlooking the Cantabrian Sea, is a premier Spanish language learning institution. It also hosts events like the current one, that run alongside the day to day bread and butter work of the Fundacion, designed to inform its practice. The focus here is on online communication across different languages. Francisco has introduced the concept of "infoxificacion", defined as "intoxificacion por exceso de informacion", and is opening up his dicussion into a focus on genre.

Meanwhile, capturing the nano-generational change rate upon us, Michele is tweeting (on her Kindle Fire) as I blog (on a netbook). So it goes. Most of the audience are making notes in the conference notes books provided in the conference pack. Meanwhile, I'm blown away by the media environment in this small auditorium. The internet connection is lightning fast, and the sound is stunning -- seemingly augmented by the aged limewashed stone walls.

Working his way through the experiences of reading online and keeping going, following interests, Paco is marking out what he sees as key distinguishing characteristics of electronic genres.

1.Los generos electronicos se transfieren de, se apartan, y se generan en la Red.

2. Los generos electronicos se torcan, se enlazan, se dispersan.

3. Los generos electronicos diluyen la autoria y enfatizan al usuario.

4. Los generos electronicos comparten la atencion del usuario. (I thought Paco's slide for this represented Michele's practices pretty well .....)

5. Los generos electronicos compiten por la atencion del usuario.

6. Los generos electronicos buscan a sus lectores.

7. Los generos electronicos se personalizan automaticamente.

Paco has interspersed during his talk illuminating sidebar discussion of viewpoints by people like Nicholas Carr (on information overload) and Eli Pariser (on the narrowing of worldview through personalised search).

A great start to what looks like being a very interesting two days.